A few thoughts on the day after Easter
April fools, this is a religious blog now
***This piece contains spoilers for Silence.***
This is going to be a short piece because I spent all of Holy Week sick as a dog.
Spent a solid forty-eight hours lying in bed, moaning, feeling too weak to move my body. Like I’d been hit by a truck, dropped out of a plane, run over by a steamroller. You’ve all been there, I’m sure.
In the grand scheme of things, it was nothing. Some people spend their whole lives feeling that way—in constant agony from the moment they’re born until the day they die, and no doctors can help them, and neither can I or any of you, and then they die, and none of it ever meant anything.
Unless it did.
***
I’ve had a steady cough for several months now.
It’s nothing, really—just that when I reached my early thirties my body decided to betray me and develop asthma and allergies to pretty much everything, and now every time I get an upper respiratory bug the cough takes forever to go away. The rest of the symptoms will disappear, but I’ll just keep coughing for weeks after. I thought maybe losing a bunch of weight would help with the breathing issues, but nah; this is just my life now. And I was almost over the cough from the last bug, the one I had back in January, but then this other bug hit me, and now I’m back to square one, and I’m going to have this cough for God-knows-how-long.
And really it’s nothing, just an annoyance, but I keep thinking to myself that this might be the last steady cough I ever have. Maybe this one will never go away, and I’ll just cough forever, the frequency increasing imperceptibly over the weeks, months, decades, until I cough myself to death, and none of it will have meant anything at all. Unless it did.
***
Earlier this year—I think it was the second week of Lent—I finally got around to watching Martin Scorsese’s 2016 film Silence. I had put off watching it for years because I really didn’t like the novel it was based on, back when I read it seven or eight years ago.
I didn’t like it because it’s a mostly-plotless thing where a Portuguese missionary watches Japanese Christians get tortured to death for page after page after page, until he finally gives up and renounces his faith. That’s the whole story. At the climax of the film, the inquisitors string the Christian peasants upside down, cut their foreheads open and let them bleed to death in the dark, unless this priest will renounce Christianity. Unless he’ll trample on this image of Jesus they’ve placed in front of him.
I keep thinking we’re all like that—just hanging in the dark, watching our lives slowly drain away. That some of us do it in agony, and some of do it in bliss, but eventually that last drop of blood will fall and return to the earth and be broken back down into plant food and we’ll breathe our last, and none of it will have ever meant anything, unless it does.
***
When author Shūsako Endō first published Silence in 1969, it was actually really unpopular with Japanese Catholics. They didn’t like it for a lot of the same reasons I didn’t—it’s just a slog through endless misery, and in the end, the main character just gives up. He tramples on the image of Christ. He rejects the whole reason he came to Japan in the first place.
What they, and I, missed, is why he does it. It’s not just because he hears the screams of anguish from the tortured Christian peasants and can’t take anymore, although that is part of it. It’s because he hears a voice, the voice he’s been begging to break its silence for the whole book, the voice of the guy in the picture.
Trample! he says. It was to be trampled on by men that I was born into this world. It was to share in men’s pain that I carried my cross.
And then he gives up, and he steps on the image, the fumie, and he renounces the faith and he lives for the rest of his life as an apostate, and none of it means anything, unless it does.
***
I can understand why others, why I, wanted a more triumphant ending. But there is no more triumphant ending. In this life, every story ends in death, every story ends in rejection, every story ends in pain and suffering and darkness. There’s nothing else. Your friends will all walk away, your loved ones will all die, your body will turn back to dust. Every drop of blood will go back into the earth, and either that earth is blessed or it’s just a chunk of rock hurtling through space.
We all want to think we’re the exception, the good guys. That when everyone else rejects the guy preaching peace and love we’ll be the last ones standing with him, the ones who don’t give into fear and hate. But we won’t. Mark 14:50 puts it pretty succinctly when it says, “Everyone rejected him and fled.” Everyone. Not the bad ones, or the weak ones, or the losers. Everyone. Every me, every you.
He came into the world to get rejected, and then he got rejected, over and over and over and over, and none of it meant anything, until it did.
***
When I started this blog, I told myself I’d be avoiding politics and religion. At least as much as possible, at least unless I had something really interesting to say about them. Back then, I was writing a regular column for a religious website and doing a podcast that was frequently political, and this blog was supposed to be a respite from all that.
But you can only pretend not to care about the things you care about for so long.
Because, here’s the thing: I have to believe that every drop of blood is a seed. That every last one of them has fallen on his face, along with the spit and the jeers and the feet of the apostates. That the very dirt has been blessed by the first fruits from the dead, and one day it will all spring back to life. That my steady cough will one day be transformed into song that never ends, that the lame will all walk and the blind will all see, even the ones no one’s ever heard of, even if they’ve been dead and in the ground since before history.
That all of it that meant nothing actually meant something. Because if not, why bother?
Anyway, Happy Easter. I’ll be back with something more normal in a week or so. 🕹🌙🧸
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